WASHINGTON, D.C. — New technology from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) allows the group to verify ASC-certified seafood back to its farm of origin with better than 95% accuracy.

Based on Trace Element Fingerprinting (TEF), the technology will, in part, help ASC further reduce seafood fraud and mislabeling, occurrences all too common in both wild-caught and farmed seafood, according to the group. 

“If you want to make claims about being the ‘best’ or ‘sustainable,’ you must be able to verify where and how the seafood was raised,” said Peter Redmond, senior market development manager, ASC North America. “We are encouraged by the opportunity this technology brings to further strengthen our certification program.”

ASC is the world’s leading provider of farmed seafood certification. Since 2010, the organization has been creating and enforcing the world’s strictest combination of standards for:

• Improving farmed seafood quality and safety.
• Ensuring supply chain integrity by tracing from the farm to the store.
• Providing full transparency through public disclosure.
• Protecting the environment, workers and communities.

ASC is the only certifying program that can verify your seafood is what it claims to be, where it came from, how it was responsibly raised and how it got to you.

Now, with TEF, ASC has the ability to trace farmed seafood with even more accuracy. Tests have already been conducted at several ASC-certified shrimp farms in Southeast Asia. In these, ASC and their partners were able to correctly identify the farms of origin in all samples and achieved better than 95% accuracy compared to lower accuracy rates for conventional statistical methodologies.

Consumers can find the sea green ASC-certified responsible seafood label at grocers and seafood counters nationwide. Internationally, the ASC label is on more than 19,400 products.